Unequal Schools, Unequal Chances: The Challenges to Equal Opportunity in the Americas

Unequal Schools, Unequal Chances is a major contribution to the debate on educational policy in the Americas. Fernando Reimers’s goals are to provide evidence on educational conditions, factors that determine them, and policies designed to improve the condition of education for the poor. He does this admirably, having brought together experts in the field who provide 16 well-researched and clearly written essays that use both descriptive and ordinary least squares econometric techniques. Although each essay has a specific scope, and cannot hold constant for many other educational factors—as does J. Douglas Willms’s and Marie-Andrée Somers’s, Schooling Outcomes in Latin America: A Report for UNESCO (2000), using hierarchic linear modeling techniques—the cumulative evidence on smaller-scale topics complements and confirms many of the results of the Willms-Somers study, providing additional country level information that is useful for both the general public and specialists.Fernando Reimers argues that increased educational coverage has not been accompanied by equality of educational opportunity, because students attending different types of schools have different patterns of achievement. Poor children have less access to all levels of education, attend schools of lower quality and are socially segregated. Their parents are less able to provide the financial, social and cultural capital needed to help them. Lower spending on marginalized and rural public schools, whose students are often malnourished and ill, and therefore often are absent from school, exacerbates this pattern. These are key factors in perpetuating inequality of income, because of the high correlation between education and earnings.Reimers, however, points out that “cross sectional studies could not adequately distinguish casual effects of school resources on student achievement from selection effects generated by the … self-selection of students to different schools and classrooms” (p. 31). It is, indeed, difficult to evaluate compensatory programs when the object is to retain poorly performing students in school, as well as to improve achievement: retaining students with low grades lowers the average results of a school program, so that test scores alone are insufficient for evaluation of the program. Moreover, Inés Aguerrondo points out that in Argentina the education system places the “blame for school failure on the socioeconomic conditions of the family or on the child’s ‘learning problems’… the end result is a perverse cycle that reinforces poverty” (p. 147).Juan Eduardo García-Huidobro and Ernesto Schiefelbein and Paulina Schiefelbein point out that Chile’s programs for equity are not sufficient to undo the effect of traditional teaching methods, privatization and decentralization, which increase inequality of educational opportunity. Alfredo Sarmiento Gómez’s discussion of education and poverty in Colombia points out that the probability of being poor increases with household size. His regression estimates indicate that the rate of return to primary education is higher than the rate of return to secondary education, but lower than the rate of return to university education.Teresa Bracho analyzes exclusion from education in Mexico, noting that only lip service is given to achieving equality. Sylvia Schmelkes analyzes the persistent failure of schools to effectively serve the Indian population. She writes that “pedagogy should be designed to allow for the cultural relevance of each school … the knowledge and values of each Indian group should form an important part of the specific curriculum.” Carlos Muñoz Izquierda and Raquel Ahuja Sánchez analyze the Program to Overcome the Educational Gap in the poorest Mexican states. They note that the greater heterogeneity of characteristics among upper income students provides greater explanatory power for analysis of the factors effecting educational outcomes of this group than is possible for lower income students, who have relatively homogeneous characteristics. They state that distribution of guides to teachers makes a significant contribution to the achievement of students in the lowest income stratum.Kin Bing Wu et al. write that inequality between rich and poor students increases after the fourth grade in Peru, and states that nonavailability of textbooks and low parental expectations contribute to low student achievement. Gary Orfield indicates that in the United States there are effects of expenditures and that “total expenditures, student-teacher ratio, teacher experience, and teacher education were significantly related to student test score outcomes” (p. 417). He cautions that use of test scores as a measure of achievement should be adjusted for the student’s family background. Fernando Reimers, in concluding, argues that “poor children must acquire capabilities for collective action, for political efficacy” (p. 437) to enable them to envision a better life and to take the actions needed for changing the structure of society.